Balsam Sirens Read online

  John shook his head. “Very strange words: don’t know where I came from, that’s all.”

  John drained his glass. “The really odd thing about it is that once I began to get used to the shock, come to terms with it, I started to be curious. Got a lot more interested in the research. I have a fairly good idea of what I’ll find in general. It’s a story that’s been told before.”

  Maurice brought two more pints. By this time John had my full attention. I was beginning to have an inkling of what impact this was having on him and had become engrossed in his account to an extent that surprised me.

  I think John recognized that I was beginning to connect with what he had told me. We raised our new pints, clinked them together, held eye contact for a few seconds, and just before taking a sip I sensed that an old boyhood friendship had reignited.

  “I’m not sure what I could do to help in this, John. But if there is anything, just say the word.”

  John nodded in acknowledgement.

  “There is a word. Two words, actually. ‘Sounding board’. I’d like to be able to walk you through what I know at some stage”, he said. “Another view would help.”

  John stopped here and looked at me for a moment.

  “I wasn’t sure how you might take this”, he said. “Thought maybe you might just say ‘very interesting, John’, then walk away.”

  I made to object, but John held up his hand. I recognized his slow smile.

  “Just wanted to check that I could still get your goat.”

  There was another pause here. I then made some blunt comments on my own outrage at realizing, finally, what had happened to First Nations peoples and the scarcely believable stances taken by successive governments. “It just beggars belief”, I concluded lamely.

  John nodded, and I could almost sense his relief. His manner then changed subtly, and he took a longer draw on his pint. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, set his glass down with exaggerated care, then directed at me a piercing gaze.

  “At this point”, he said, in a careful and deliberate way, “I think I’m likely to be more help to you than the other way round.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. There are other people out there digging as well. Digging into old First Nations records and into a lot of historical stuff from the nineteenth century.”

  I was beginning to have an uneasy feeling.

  “And some of the questions they’ve been asking have been about you.”

  Twenty-five

  My deer-caught-in-the-headlights look probably lasted only a second or two.

  “About me?”

  John nodded.

  “Why? I don’t … I can understand people looking for gossip. My connection to Largs has always been a favourite topic, but I’ve got used to that. But you seem … you’re saying that you’ve come across some sort of reference … some current reference to me in some pretty serious research that you’ve been doing? Can you give me details?”

  John explained it all in what struck me as the clear, logical thinking of a lawyer. Over a period of just a few weeks, he had come across a few pieces of paper that had revealed an unknown past. His father was a member of the Curve Lake First Nation; the status of his mother was not known. John’s father had been in and out of trouble with the law most of his life, but the experience of recent decades left ample room for doubt about police bias that might have been involved in these judgments. In John’s mind, the situation surrounding his parents might well have been somewhat chaotic, but his reading over the past months had left him in no doubt about the damage caused to the native culture and to individual lives, left crippled and rudderless by a century and a half of deliberate and systematic suppression. The effects would have been profoundly negative. And it was clear that John was seeing this now in a directly personal way.

  A mere four pieces of paper were the only result of the weeks of John’s searching. There was a birth certificate bearing the name John Longfeather, a statement documenting that John Longfeather had been taken into protective care by county authorities when he was thirteen months old, adoption papers granting the care of John Longfeather to Alfred and Margery Woodhouse dated one month after the protective care order, and a legal change of name from John Longfeather to John Woodhouse.

  In the process of locating this material, John had found many documents relating to the Curve Lake First Nation, to the Anishinaabe and Ojibway in general, and to the interactions of these peoples with the French, later with the English, and much later with the Canadians. Things were blurry here, and it was something of a mug’s game to be too specific in assigning “responsibility” for what had happened. But over a period of more than a century, actions had been taken, some of them quite sanctimoniously, that resulted in suppression of indigenous peoples, if not a slow long-term genocide. John had read about the Iroquois wars, the French missions in Huronia, and especially the Sulpician mission established by Francois Fénelon at the Bay of Quinte. From that base, missionaries, including Fénelon himself, travelled along what is now the Trent waterway and the Kawartha Lakes trying to bring Christianity to the Iroquois and others. John noted that he became very interested in this “French connection”, especially the link between Fénelon the missionary and Chateau Fénelon in Périgord, and to Fénelon’s much better-known younger brother of the same name, who remained in France and gained renown as a theologian, poet, and writer.

  “The younger Fénelon wrote Les Aventures de Telemaque, or The Adventures of Telemachus”, and while this somewhat off-the-wall statement by John sailed right over my head, I was greatly impressed by his French pronunciation, until I remembered the modern languages course he pursued as an undergraduate.

  John caught me smiling at him.

  “I know”, he said, slightly defensively. “Self-indulgent. But I was always interested in history”, something I hadn’t known or hadn’t remembered. Then a connection occurred to me.

  “Is this particular angle of history a recent interest?”

  “You should have been a lawyer”, he said drily. “No. But many of the links going back to First Nations have suddenly become of interest. You know about the mound near Balsam Lake along the shore of South Bay? There’s clear evidence that it had been there probably centuries before the French came to North America. Got me thinking about what those French found, what they thought, back then. Began looking for information on local natives. Found out things. Lots of things. Those people, the First Nations, they’d been here a long, long time. Thousands of years. I found I was left with a very odd feeling, learning that they considered this area, the Kawartha Lakes, to be special.”

  It was a struggle not to let my impatience show. But it seemed that I might have to wait some time to hear about how my name popped up in John’s researches.

  “You’re probably wondering when I’ll get to you”, John said, as if reading my mind.

  John related how his reading gradually led him to that time when New France was handed over to England after France’s defeat at the Plains of Abraham.

  “You have to dig for it”, he said, “but things happened as the French learned that the place was under new management. The English were coming in. There were clashes. Some of the French decided to leave. Some dropped everything, made a dash for Montreal. There were patrols of redcoats coming in. Many of the French who met English regulars were stripped of anything valuable. After all, they were the losers and ancestral enemies to boot. There were long-time missionaries in Huronia. Been there ages. All along the shore of Georgian Bay. There was a story that they had built up some wealth. Hard to believe, in my view. There’s a story that lives on. The story is that some of these guys took their wealth with them, golden church artefacts, so the tale goes. No idea where they might have got the gold.”

  John continued his account. Some of the missionaries made it safely to Montreal. But one group narrowly escaped detection by redcoats, and they decided to bury their gold and attempt to come back for it
later. And the story is that they buried it here, on Ghost Island, in Balsam Lake.

  “Lots of people have looked for this gold. Nobody has ever found any. The whole story is likely preposterous, an impossible fabrication. But the rumours are still around after more than two and a half centuries.”

  John shook his head, a wry expression on his face.

  “Believe it or not, I went looking for details of this. Found that I had to start making phone calls. I spoke to people who just repeated the Ghost Island myth, but when I asked them specific questions it was clear that they knew nothing. A couple of people seemed well-informed. One of them, a man named Jacobs, indicated how surprised he had been when he had to field two similar and apparently serious inquiries in the same week. I asked Jacobs about this. He went into details on the other inquiry. Said the guy had asked him about Ghost Island. But also about Largs and men called McCleod and Whelan. I then asked Jacobs who had been making the inquiries. Might help me if I contacted this fellow, I said. Jacobs said he had already probed that angle, out of his own interest. The guy just waved the question off, said that he was inquiring on behalf of a client. Couldn’t tell Jacobs who or why. The inquirer then asked if any written information was available. Jacobs told him that over the years several local historical societies had collected the speculations and the few crumbs of fact that were available. It had all been consolidated into a book. Happened that Jacobs was offering this book for sale as a private publication. The inquirer said he would take a copy.” John paused here.

  “That’s when the inquirer did something odd: he paid for the book by credit card.”

  John drained his beer glass, looked at me inquiringly, but I indicated that two was enough.

  “It took some coaxing. But I got Jacobs to give me the man’s credit card number”, and at that point John passed a slip of paper to me.

  “Do you mind if I make a call?” I asked.

  John waved me his permission, so I called Mike and passed on a short version of what I had just heard, along with the credit card number.

  Laying my cellphone on the table, I smiled across at John.

  “Don’t ask”, I said.

  John shook his head. “No intention.”

  Maurice came by with our beer and a big smile, and we both took long swigs. I looked at John in what must have seemed to him a speculative manner.

  “I hope we can have more conversations, John. I would very much like to do a lot of catching up. I hope you would like to do so as well.”

  “I would. Very much.”

  “I’d also like to talk to you about this, what should I call it, change in identity.”

  “Gladly”, John said.

  The fact was that I had become aware of another connection we now had, something different, a link that went “back to the land” in a way, back to something primeval.

  John smiled, and it seemed that he knew what I was thinking.

  He looked at me levelly and said, “Let’s travel this road together.”

  Twenty-six

  It was almost midnight when I got home again to Largs. I was buoyed up by the discussion I had had with John, who was beginning to feel like a new old friend. But I was also encouraged by the possibility that the credit card number he had given me would provide a way into whatever operation it was that I had run afoul of over the past days.

  Mike was sitting at the kitchen table when I came in.

  “Sit!” he ordered, and when I did that without question or comment, Mike explained to me briefly that he had called a colleague and told him to get onto this business pronto, and that there would be a fat bonus if he really hit the deck running and got results.

  Mike had just received those results.

  “The credit card was in the name of a company, but that didn’t stop my guy. We have a name and an address now.”

  I knew better than to ask how.

  “I’ve sent another guy around to have a chat with Mr. Credit Card.”

  “Another guy?” I asked, a little perplexed.

  “Some people are good at digging and some people are good at persuading. They aren’t necessarily the same people.”

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “We wait.”

  “How long do you think it will take?”

  Mike made to answer, but just then his cellphone vibrated. It was a text message.

  “Okay. My guy is at our chap’s place, a rather grubby spot near Dufferin and St. Clair.”

  “What will he do now?”

  “I leave that up to the guy on the scene.”

  Mike put down his phone. He had the air of someone who was content to wait, since he didn’t expect to have to wait long.

  “Just out of curiosity”, Mike said, “give me a bit of background on how John got this information.”

  I filled him in quickly, but we both glanced at his cellphone every few seconds.

  “Hard to believe that the guy would use a credit card. I’m sensing a gene pool that’s short on water”, Mike commented drily.

  “Or overconfidence, feeling that nobody would ever find out about their little game”, I added.

  “Or both”, Mike concluded.

  We both looked at the cellphone again.

  “It sounds”, Mike mused, “as though the competition is some way behind, that they’re still thrashing around trying to get a better fix on where they should be looking.”

  “Maybe”, I said. “But in fact they might be ahead of us in this. Somewhere they’ve got hold of what they consider credible information that whatever it is that’s worth having really does exist. They also seem to think that they know approximately where it is. ‘Some way behind’ doesn’t seem to me to fit that description very well.”

  “And?”

  “What do you mean ‘and’?” I said. “That means that probably nothing I say or do would convince them that there’s nothing to be had. So, if they don’t find it themselves, there’s every chance they would suspect that I might know more, and come after me to tell them. What we seem to be looking at is something between a serious nuisance and a dangerous threat.”

  “What makes you think there’s nothing to be had?” Mike asked.

  “When you’re grubbing around the bottom of a lake for something that you think is valuable, you’re basically treasure hunting. All but the most serious of these ventures are just based on delusions. Given the number of divers, snorkellers, and people who just like to look for stuff, and given the numbers of those people who have spent time on Balsam Lake over I don’t know how many decades, I think that anything bigger than a change purse would have been found already.”

  “I’m sure you realize that I really don’t buy this business of a collection of artefacts. In fact, I’m very vague on just what this ‘valuable something’ might be”, Mike said, leaning back in his chair.

  “That makes two of us, Mike. But let’s take the one bit of factual information we have: somebody thinks there is something valuable there for some reason. Maybe it’s an assembly of old artefacts, as I’ve speculated. But maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s something closer to the strike-it-rich idea at the core of the old romantic notion of treasure. When I look at it from that point of view, the first thing I come across is the lost treasure of Ghost Island. It almost certainly doesn’t exist. Then there are wrecks of old steamboats and what might have gone down with them. Finding these wrecks is the first step. One was found near Peterborough a couple of years back when they drained part of the canal system there to do some repairs. There it was, one morning, the skeleton of an old boat poking out of the water. Some people seem to think that every steamboat on the lakes around here was full of Mississippi gamblers, high rollers carrying wads of cash and bags of gold, and that any steamboat wreck is likely hiding its own fortune. Worse than delusional. Sheer invention. Then there’s the question of those boats’ cargoes. People seem to think –”

  Mike was paying attention through only one ear. But whe
n I stopped speaking, he looked over at me in some amusement and found me staring off into space.

  “People seem to think … what, Mark?”

  Mike sat up.

  “Hey! Mark! People seem to think what?”

  “Sorry, Mike, but I’ve just come up with something that can’t wait.”

  I rose quickly.

  “I’ve got to work it out.”

  Mike made to say something.

  “No, Mike. No talking. I mean I have to work it out right now.”

  And I walked out of the room into the den, leaving Mike to wonder and wait.

  After an hour and a half, I had three variants that made sense. I went over the eighty pages or so of notes that I had accumulated from my reading over the past two days and found something that narrowed the three variants to two. I wrote out narratives for both of them, then sat looking at the page of text for each. They were a little rough, and there were some small gaps, but I could find no fatal errors, no fundamental idiocies. I went over them both several times more. The pages seemed almost to blend into one another, but the story was clear enough that I could actually picture a typical McCleod steamboat. It was sitting at the Largs landing stage taking on passengers. Wood smoke was rising in a vertical column from its single stack. The captain gave a toot on the whistle. There was a damp musty smell of steam in the air. Men were shouting and cursing at a load of cargo. I could now smell the woodsmoke. It was resiny, resiny and … and …

  “Mark!”

  Someone shouting, shouting at me … from the dock?

  “Mark!”

  I was suddenly being jostled in a crowd.

  “Mark! Wake up!”

  I raised my head. Mike still had his hand on my shoulder where he had been shaking me. A sheet of paper was stuck to my right cheek.

  “We’ve got some information now!” Mike said. “The guy in charge is someone called Carl Dickson.”

  “Who is he?” I asked.